134 PRINCIPAL EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE 



several places notable in this respect. Such are the 

 Southern part of Arabia, the Island of Dioscorides (Dm 

 Zokotora of the moderns, a corruption of the Sanscrit 

 Dvipa Sukhatara), cultivated by Indian settlers, and the 

 auriferous East African coast of Sofala. Arabia, and the 

 island just mentioned to the south east of the Straits of 

 33ab-el-Mandeb, formed for the combined Phoenician and 

 Hebrew commerce intermediate and uniting links between 

 the Indian peninsula and the East Coast of Africa. Indians 

 had settled on the latter from the earliest times as on a 

 shore opposite to their own, and the traders to Ophir might 

 find in the basin of the Erythrean and Indian Seas other 

 sources of gold than India itself. 



Less influential than the Phoenicians in connecting dif- 

 ferent nations and in extending the geographical horizon, 

 and early subjected to the Greek influence of Pelasgic Tyr- 

 rhenians arriving from the sea, we have next to consider the 

 austere and gloomy nation of the Etruscans. A not incon- 

 siderable inland trade with the remote amber countries was 

 carried on by them, passing through Northern Italy, and 

 across the Alps, where a " via sacra" ( 184 ) was protected by all 

 the neighbouring tribes. It seems to have been almost by the 

 same route that the primitive Tuscan people, the Kasense, came 

 from Rhsetia to the Padus, and even still farther southward. 

 That which is most important to notice, according to the 

 point of view which we have selected, and in which we seek 

 always to seize what is most general and permanent, is the 

 influence exerted by the commonwealth of Etruria on the 

 earliest Bom an civil institutions, and thus upon the whole 

 of Eoman life. The reflex action of this influence, in its re- 

 motely derived consequences, may be said to be still politically 



